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Andre De Toth: Films
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The son of a Hungarian military officer, Andre De Toth studied law at the University of Budapest. His academic career was shelved when De Toth became involved with the Hungarian film industry, where he served in several artistic and technical capacities before graduating to director in 1938.
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De Toth, who described himself as a "Hungarian-born, one-eyed American cowboy from Texas," was born in Mako. After studying law in Budapest, he tried his hand at playwriting (becoming friendly with playwright Ferenc Molnar) and sculpture. He entered Hungarian films in 1931 as screenwriter, editor, second-unit director and sometime actor, billed variously as Endré Toth, Andreas Toth and, finally, André de Toth.
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The big panning shot over the field near the start of the award sequence is one of de Toth's most character-and-spectacle packed pans. This sequence offers a dramatic visual contrast to the rest of the film. It is entirely rectilinear, with the Navy men standing in regular, straight line formations. There are no circles. And there are no overhead objects or forms controlling the characters spaces. Everyone is standing out on a huge field, with open sky above them.
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De Toth's life was as packed with incident as his films. In his autobiography Fragments: Portraits from the Inside (1994), he told how the piratical black patch he wore over his missing eye (lost as the result of a childhood accident) once nearly cost him his life.
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Arguably de Toth's greatest American films are two of his last, Day of the Outlaw and Play Dirty. The mission in Play Dirty becomes an exercise in futility, while de Toth gives us one of the few truly intelligent, cinematically articulate uses of the new pan-and-zoom style just then becoming common: his zooms into and out of the stark locale have the paradoxical effect of destroying depth, heightening the pervasiveness of surface.
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[I]t's a good thing the film is so gosh darn pretty, because plotting was never De Toth's strong suit, and the unremarkable Man in the Saddle is no exception. Based on a similarly-titled novel by Ernest Haycox, the wholly predictable story is fraught with romantic melodrama and formulaic revenge, overused clichés that fail to hook in the viewer with anything particularly unique or compelling. Action, too, is rather slight, hinging on a few set-pieces like a runaway burning wagon, a lights-out gunfight, and an epic fistfight that demolishes a cabin and sends both participants rolling down the side of a mountain. These are great moments, to be sure, but they're too few and far between.
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